Better Lives – Reflection on lecture 2, Culture.
In our Better lives lecture on culture we discussed the impact of fashion on a human scale, the impacts on sustainability, culture and society.
For me the fundamental take away from this project wasn’t the criticism of fashion as a system but the people that support and sustain the system. Not to criticise what we want to see change but why we aren’t seeing the change we want within fashion at the pace or standard society wants when we have a progressive platform, even from a cynical perspective, would be easy to commercialise.
Commercialism prioritises capital over humanity and is one of the flaws within a modern society that thrives off advertising and consumerism. Commercial fashion provides jobs and is the main source of opportunities to get paid for many photographers. Changing a system that holds capital over the people that support it is more than just about good lectures and encouragement as it is often easier to stay the same and accept consequences than to enact change. Moreover, is it morally right to ask people to give up their jobs, reduce their income or reject opportunities for another person? It’s human nature to follow the path of least resistance. How are you going to get thousands of students to take the harder path to create a progressive industry?
As fashion students many of us are inherently the children of commercialism, we represent society as a hierarchy founded upon consumerism and capitalism. Our focuses are following, reputation and appearance. Fashion plays with the anxiety of not being good enough. The anxiety creates an addiction and obsession, that has a similar mental impact to an abusive relationship. As long as we associate fashion with anxiety, we will depend on it and return to it, because we want to reclaim a part of our individuality, we subconsciously feel fashion has corrupted. Social media has furthered this impact as it creates a sense of competitive validation, that your worth is defined by likes and your place in the hierarchy of human worth is quantifiable. As a student, as a photographer and as a person we do not want to give up these positions of power within a social hierarchy, so we compete. Our human attachment to power, money and reputation has been exaggerated by commercialism and social media, which has consequently corrupted fashion as a system and a community.
For this “Better Lives” project I want to look at how to progress effectively and not use progress as a commercial aspect within an advertisement. Starting with the critique of teaching fashion students a new set of morals, as well as encouraging commercial fashion by accepting students into the system that prioritise the social hierarchy in fashion. To what extent is it possible to create progressive fashion ideas and also have a sustainable living income that encourages photographers and artists to think naturally about creating better lives. Or is it that society is too wrapped up in our own anxiety of self-image to want to appreciate anything other than fantasy of perfection?